Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to devices that prevent interruptions from telemarketers and other unwanted telephone calls. More particularly, the present invention relates to the devices used for call screening and processing of unwanted calls from interfering with a recipient's daily routine.
Description of the Related Art
As daily life becomes ever-more hectic, the opportunity to spend some period of time without being interrupted/disturbed by telemarketers, charity solicitors, and telephone surveys becomes increasingly valuable.
In response to the public uproar over the intrusions of telemarketers calling to offer unneeded and unwanted products, a “DO NOT CALL LIST” was created by the government to prevent unwanted intrusions by telemarketers. However, the “DO NOT CALL LIST” is not a complete solution as there are exemptions for entities, such as not-for-profit agencies, political pollsters, etc.
In addition, many people are unaware that every time they register with a website, use a credit card, or sign up to make a purchase, there is a potential that the fine print of the agreement includes an agreement to receive calls regarding products and services relating to the website, use of the credit card, etc.
In further annoyance of the public, due to the fact that people rarely if ever return a sales call left on an answering machine or voice mail, telemarketers use automated calling equipment that dials a telephone number but does not route the call to an available telemarketer unless someone speaks (voice activation) at the receiving end. Thus, the unwanted telephone will ring and if the recipient merely picks up the telephone and does not speak, there is dead silence at the other end. Sometimes after responding to the unwanted calls, one will hear “Please wait for an important message” because all of the telemarketers are busy on other calls.
Moreover, to exacerbate the problem even further, many types of telemarketing telephone dialing equipment disconnects the call as soon as the answering machine or voice-mail answers the incoming call. This disconnection often results in one hearing 30 seconds or more of a dial tone recorded on their answering machine because the telemarketing system hung up just before the answering machine answered, and thus the dial tone comes on as though an outgoing call is being made.
Sometimes not only is the dial-tone recorded, but after a certain amount of time the local telephone company plays the message “If you like to make a call, please hang up” followed by a totally obnoxious noise intended to let you know that the phone is not ready to receive calls. These noises are often recorded on the answering machine, and unless the sound is turned off, subjects anyone in the house (people as well as pets) to this barrage of noise.
Accordingly, the ringing of the telephone is an endless interruption despite having screening services and/or devices. Even if the telemarketing machine hangs up, there will be a number of re-tries over a period of time. Hence, if one is involved in an activity and not desiring to answer the telephone, such a person will be subjected to hearing the phone ring again and again, followed by a disconnect just as the answering machine activates. The inventor of the present application is experiencing on more than one occasion the telephone ringing to wake his child after rocking the baby to sleep, with the bulk of the calls being from a telemarketer as late as 8 pm. The result is that the infant child wakes it is much more difficult to get the child to go off to sleep. Thus, the intrusions of unwanted calls are a heavy burden on the general public.
On the other hand, many people have family, friends and job responsibilities that are such that they do not want to simply shut off the ringer on the telephone. They still want to be able to receive important calls, sometimes emergency calls, without being bothered by the nonsense of sales calls, “not-for profit” survey calls and other unwanted calls from some entities which are exempt from the “DO NOT CALL” regulations.
In an attempt to solve the aforementioned problem, there have been systems designed, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,295,660 to Higginbotham et al., which provides for telemarketing screening operation by compiling a telemarketer blacklist and an associated whitelist. When a caller's telephone number is not on one of the blacklist or whitelist, the caller can be challenged to identify themselves, and the recipient of the call can press a button on the telephone that indicates whether call is to be maintained or handled as a telemarketing call, in which an outgoing message may be played requesting that such calls cease.
Another invention disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 7,333,599 to Moss, et al., provides a system and method in which all call to a customer's directory number are intercepted by a service node for disposition. The call is then forwarded to the subscriber's home, and when the call is answered, the service node states the name or telephone number of the calling partner retrieved from signaling information. The caller can then decide whether to take the call, deny the call, or send the call to voice mail and/or send a sales refusal message or other disposition.
Still another invention disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 7,231,029 provides an on-demand call blocking service. This type of service is an improvement over an anonymous call blocking service, which would merely block all anonymous calls regardless of the identity of the caller. The subscriber can first receive the incoming call, and then decide to block the calls in the future.
In most of the systems described herein above, the result is that the recipient still has the problem of listening to the unwanted telephone ring a number of times causing it to interrupt one's daily activity, followed by retries at certain time intervals as set by the caller, or needs to compile a cumbersome list, such as a blacklist, and/or an allowed group of numbers arranged in a whitelist.
In such cases, the telephone numbers must be entered and the telephone number compared with one or more lists, or the caller has to listen to the beginning of a sales call and then identify the number to be listed on a blocked list to prevent future calls.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a less cumbersome way of reducing the number of times that a consumer's telephone rings with intrusive and nuisance calls.